Most of the experiments linked to here are running on R&D equipment in a non-production environment. They may disappear without warning and/or perform erratically. If one of them isn’t working for some reason, come back later and try again.

Resolving Citations (we don’t need no stinkin’ parser)

3 minute read.

If you are reading this, you may be faced with the following problem- You have a collection of free-form citations which you have copied from a scholarly article and you want to import them into a bibliographic management tool (or other database). In short, you would like to turn something like this:

Which is cool, but is very difficult- particularly with obscure and/or terse citation styles.

There is another way. Instead of trying to parse the citation, just search for the record in a database that already has the citation parsed. The Crossref metadata search is good for this. For example, the following query using the Crossref Metadata Search API